Hodder & Stoughton pre-empts Emma Cowing's début The Show Woman

Hodder & Stoughton has pre-empted Scottish journalist Emma Cowing’s début novel based on the author’s great-aunt’s life as a trapeze artist and bareback horse rider.  

Executive publisher Jo Dickinson bought UK and Commonwealth rights in The Show Woman from Amanda Harris, global managing director of YMU Literary. Hodder will publish in spring 2025. 

The book is set in Scotland in 1910 and based on and inspired by Cowing’s great-aunt Violet and centres around four very different women who come together to form the first all-female circus act.

Cowing has written for a variety of publications, has won the Scottish Press Awards feature writer of the year and is currently the associated editor (features) at the Scottish Daily Mail. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Cheshire Novel Prize, and longlisted for the 2023 Bath Novel Award and Blue Pencil First Novel Award.

Dickinson said: “I read The Show Woman over the course of one day and it was evident from the first pages that it hit that sweet spot of well-researched, well-written, inspirational fiction that is also endlessly entertaining and memorable. The characters came alive instantly and I cared deeply about their fates. The period was beautifully drawn and appealed to all the senses, so I felt I was a part of the showground. And the author’s personal connection to the material gave it an emotional edge that remained long after I’d turned the last page. Imagine ’The Greatest Showman’ meets ’Water for Elephants’ and you have The Show Woman.” 

Cowing described The Show Woman as “my love letter to the incredible women in my family who performed on trapezes, ran their own shows, and travelled Scotland’s fairgrounds more than a century ago”.